On the evening of Thursday 3 June Fabian and I began a vacation to Italy. Wikimania is in Northern Italy later in the month, so I had planned to go to Italy for that. Both of us arranged our work for a pause and talked about what we wanted to do, and we agreed that we wanted to see typical tourist sites and learn history. I used AirBNB to book all of our rooms. We both like to stay in the gay neighborhoods, and for Rome, that meant to the northeast of the Colosseum.
On the day we arrived, Friday, we went from the airport to Roma Termini, the main train station, and from there walked south to our place which was about 20 minutes away. We could see the Colosseum from our roof, and from there walked to the Colosseum. The lines were long but we got entry passes in advance and it was easy to get in quickly. For many tourist sites in Rome it seems like planning for lines and getting advance tickets is necessary. The Colosseum is a wonder – it is large and it is striking to wonder what sorts of shows might have been performed here. Fabian and I were unable to tell which parts of the Colosseum were original and which were replaced. We talked about that throughout Rome. There were more ruins here than I expected, as structures from about 2000 years ago seem to remain throughout the city. I had not realized the placement of sites – the Forum is next to the Colosseum, so the entire district is mostly structures from ancient Rome.
On Saturday we went to the Borghese Gallery. This museum is in the main park for the city. Small sets of people visit it in two-hour blocks, so to go, one needs a reservation and to be on time. After two hours, everyone is directed out of the museum and the next group enters. The attraction here is sculpture. One of them is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite. This is a nude laying on a bed, and the museum has the reclining body facing a wall and behind a rope. In the museum it is possible to see that the body seems female from shape and breast, but the surprise in the sculpture is supposed to be that the female body has a penis. The museum hides the penis. It seems that history has had conflicting ideas of penises, because in these scuptures and those elsewhere, sometimes there are penises, sometimes they are chiselled off, and in the Vatican they are patched over with stone fig leafs and plaster. We went from the Borghese Gallery in the morning around the park for a bit and later in the afternoon went to the Palazza Massimo, which is one of several museums that are collectively called the National Roman Museum. Fabian and I were surprised that on the ground floor the usual collection of ancient Roman marble heads had been curated by a hair stylist, and that practically all of the curation notes critiqued the hair styles by describing technical execution, commonality, and significance. He collected pictures in case he needed them for work and I thought about checking Wikipedia’s coverage of hair styles from that era. There were two bronze statues said to be Greek originals here, and completely intact. One was a boxer and the other was a gladiator. I had never seen images of these before. The boxer had cuts on his face that seemed to be chiseled after casting. The gladiator had grooves on his face to present a beard, which is not something that I imagined could be done based on having seen photographs of similar statues in which such detail could not be shown. That night we went to Gay Street across from the Colosseum and attended an LGBT film festival for short films. Themes in the film were familiar as compared to American films – difficulty coming out, experiences of homophobia, and starts to relationships. The festival was part of Roma Pride, and there would be events on Gay Street nightly. There were drag performers as hosts.
Sunday we went to the Capitoline Museums. We walked there from home, as it is on the edge of the forum and so close to where we were. We saw the ruins of a temple to Minerva and a statue of Emperor Nerva, who is said to have had the temple made. Trajan’s column is just beyond that, then a huge memorial to Victor Emmanuel, and the museum is just beyond that. The museum is fine. There is a huge original equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius there, made presumably by someone who saw his face in person. In that same room there are some remains of an Etruscan temple. I do not know much about Etruscan culture, but by the ruins, the exhibition is about how Etruscans worshiped the same gods and Greeks and Romans and they had an established city in what later became Rome. That night we went back to Roma Pride on Gay Street and attended a chamber music performance. This was the first time that I have ever seen classical musical performance presented as an LGBT pride event attraction.
Monday we slept in a bit, then went to the Ara Pacis with plans to walk from Piazza Navona to the Spanish Steps later in the evening when it was cooler. The Ara Pacis is an altar and I wondered what happened during a Roman ritual. At this altar it seemed like it must have been an intimate experience, because the design of the template and altar do not allow much of an audience to witness anything. Below the Ara Pacis is another general museum, and when we went, they had an exhibition of the work of the Japanese photographer Ken Domon. He has images of Japan before and after World War II, showing daily life and urban scenes. I imagined that this pairing of contemporary art draws local people into this museum, because the altar does not change and with it being alone it is unlikely to be a regular draw in the way that other museums can be seen repeatedly. Outside the Ara Pacis it seems that skateboarders are welcome because they all seemed so cosy there to bounce around. Outside and out of the way of the hangers around there is a tomb for Roman emperors, fenced in when previously it appears people were allowed to approach. There are so many ruins here that sometimes preservation must mean fencing things off until such time other projects are done and funding is available to care properly for places. We walked from here to Piazza Novona, finding the area to be walkable in general. The police at Piazza Novona wore medieval looking caps with feathers in them, and were continually telling tourists not to photograph them. It is sort of strange that they dress in a way that attracts maximum attention, looking like a guardsman from centuries ago but outfited with a semiautomatic rifle, and yet their duty includes discouraging the natural tendency for people to photograph odd and amazing looks. Anyone seeking to do terrorism need only to wait until a tour group passes them, then they are completely distracted telling everyone “no pictures”. They say “no photos” continually. From here we went to the Pantheon. As we continually did, Fabian and I talked about which parts of the building were original and which were replacements. Perhaps all? Perhaps none? It is hard to imagine a building like this standing for so long, and hard also to imagine how anything could have been repaired with pre-modern tools. It was a little sad to see it turned into a Christian church, but in checking Wikipedia, it has been a church longer than it has been a temple, and I suppose that is why it is still intact. Why is Raphael’s dead body in here? Victor Emmanuel has his own garish monument – why is his body here? I wish they would restore this to be a Roman temple. I did not feel passion for the Christian church to be in there – obviously it is not a Christian building. Next to the Pantheon is a coffee shop called Tazza de Oro and Fabian and I had nice coffee. We went to the Trevi Fountain, then to the Spanish Steps.
Tuesday we went to the Vatican Museums we arrived at noon and left at five. Everything was a wonder. One surprise for me was that the museum was arranged for tourists like any other. I am not sure what I expected because of course large numbers of people have to eat, but in a holy place I might have expected that they serve something somber. They provide burgers and pizza like any other tourist establishment. We brought lots of snacks and ate a lot before going but were still hungry, and tried to find something vegan to eat. Apparently the Franciscan pope in office, lover of animals though he is imagined to be, has not regulated the menu. Typically vegetarian food is hard to find here, and even food claimed to be vegan might have eggs or fish or milk in it. Whatever the case, it was hard to find compatible food in the Vatican, and I wonder if things will ever change. In the Raphael Rooms I had not anticipated that the paintings would be so large – the people in The School of Athens and others are life-sized. There was gallery entirely of maps that I had not read about – The Gallery of Maps – I do not know if these were originally art or for study. I really liked the sea monster deeper in the ocean. The Sistine Chapel has an amazing roof and back wall, as is well known, and as others say, this probably is the single most amazing artwork anywhere. Something that I did not anticipate was relatively poor quality artwork on other walls in the Sistine Chapel. I wonder if those walls were painted before or after Michaelangelo. It would have been a horrible commission to get after he did the roof, because there is no comparison to that. Even though the walls are well-executed and could be called masterpieces, I suppose, they look so dopey when seen in context. In the Sistine Chapel talking is not allowed, so very loudly over megaphones, guards there make shhhh sounds. I have never heard shhhhes amplified over loudspeakers before but I suppose it is the best thing to do. Since people come in continually these very loud shhhhes happen every minute at least. We excited the Sistine Chapel to outside where we went to the cupola of Saint Peter’s Basilica to look down. The stairs were made with a low incline so it was fun to walk up and nice to be at the top looking down. We saw a bit of the church, went down and bought some medals from the gift shop, then we had to cross town to pick up paper tickets from a church that arranges for papal audience tickets for Americans.
Wednesday we went to see the pope. Many Wednesdays he has general audience in the courtyard of the Vatican. People with tickets may go hear him. The experience is that people arrive in advance, probably no later than 8am to get a seat for the 10am presentation. Around 9 there are announcements of which church groups are visiting and from where. Sometime around 10 the pope drives around the court in the popemobile, waving and smiling. Everyone is eager to see his face even though he goes by so quickly. Pope Francis looked at Fabian and me when he passed, and he was smiling. He eventually makes his way to the front. There are prayers and a reading from the Bible. The reading for our day was the story of the marriage of Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, and how typically at parties the host serves the good alcohol first so that drunk people take less notice when the cheap wine comes out later. In the miracle, everyone at the party drank all the wine, then Jesus made a lot more, and people commented that this wine was the best. Fabian and I were talking about the meaning of this. He said that the moral was that at parties it is fun to bring out the good stuff even to drunk people. I said I was unsure of the moral. The lesson was translated into lots of languages, as many of the people there spoke neither English or Italian. The pope blessed our religious artifacts, including medals and Christ child doll that Fabian got. Following the service we sat in the shade on some steps and wrote postcards and letters, with me mailing some medals to some friends. There was such a crowd going into the basilica after the pope’s talk, but as we had stepped aside to do other things for a while, it was easy for us to get in. On the way we climbed the Holy Stairs, and to get into the basilica, we got to go through the Holy Door because Francis designated this year as the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy. It was fortunate that we got to visit at all, but then more fortunate still that we came in a year of Jubilee.
On Thursday 9 June we went to the the Appian Way. Tourist attractions there include two sets of catacombs and the ruins of a villa said to have been built by Maxentius. One of the catacombs used to hold the remains of Saint Sebastian, until those remains were moved to a church built on top of the catacombs now presenting Sebastian in a more extravagant way. In addition to having his body, the church also has one of the arrow that shot him. For some reason, the church also has some clay into which Jesus stomped his footprints during the “quo vadis?” miracle.
Saint Sebastian is a gay icon and Fabian and I had been noting when we saw paintings of him on this tour. The standard format for depicting Saint Sebastian is to show an attractive guy in his underwear or less standing around looking bored with his hands behind his back and not reacting to arrows piercing his body. Presumably each image, especially when the faces are more detailed, are depictions of someone’s boyfriend.
In the Callisto Catacombs we were surprised to find that the remains of saint and martyr Pope Fabian were kept. Neither Fabian nor I knew that there was a Pope Fabian, but we thought it was fortunate that we were able to visit the site of his namesake’s remains.
After returning to home we were tired. There was a gay pride event that night just a few minutes walk away, and although I wanted to go I really wanted to sleep. Fabian said that he would go alone just for a bit. Immediately after walking outside of our door, Fabian twisted his ankle and was in pain on the sidewalk. He had a serious sprain and could only stop to recover and assess the seriousness of it. I had no idea – I was not checking my phone, and I later found that Fabian could not have contacted me because he left his phone behind anyway. He told me that he sat on the sidewalk in pain, until eventually he felt like coming back up the stairs in a hurt state. He said that he felt good enough to sleep. I had no idea what to do because his ankle was swollen and I did not know if he would need medical attention or anything else. We went to sleep. In the morning he wanted Ibuprofen so I found some for him and he said it helped. We had planned to go to the Roman Forum that morning but he could not walk. I regretted that he was injured, but he was nice to encourage me to go to the Forum without him. I did go, and I was glad for the experience. Actually visiting the Forum was meaningful for me as it put things that I had read into context. After I returned Fabian said that he was well enough to walk to the nearby subway, which we did, then we took the train to Florence.